Ben at Raspberry Pi wanted to use his new vanity domain rpf.io, as a URL shortener rather than the URL of the common big services. The easy solution was to use an existing service on a paid account which gives us analytics and tracking. However, demonstrating the age old principle of if you have to ask you can’t afford it, his email reads…

We like Open Source software, so instead of paying enough money to rent quite a nice car for a trivial .htaccess file we instead chose to install yourls on a little IPv6-only virtual machine behind our NAT64 and IPv6 Proxy services.

We’ve done some benchmarking, out of the box we could sustain 500 hits/second, adding in php-apc boosted this to well over 2000 hits/second which should be enough, even if Liz Upton gets very excited with the Raspberry Pi twitter account.

So you can test out the service here http://rpf.io/mythic before we start making these links public.

Last night was the annual TrefBash, a large party for people involved in the UK networking industry. Several people asked why Pete didn’t attend, so we’ve lent him the company blog to explain his answer.

Pete writes:

I donate a lot of time to Raspberry Pi because I believe that we need more competent people in the tech industry. One thing I see is at younger ages we have a mixed gender balance, at older ages it becomes increasingly male dominated. A quick look at the boards of the UK Internet Exchanges (100% male) and attendance lists for conferences will tell you that networking is no different from the rest of the tech industry with an extremely strong male bias.

It’s improved: it’s been a while since there has been an AGM for a Internet Exchange in the Bavarian Beerhouse where busty women with cleavage serve male geeks beer. We have a Respect policy for conferences so it’s now official that you can’t be discriminatory. However as with all things it’s two steps forward, one step back.

Not a photo of the burlesque dancer, this blog is safe for work even if the industry events aren’t

The theme for last nights TrefBash15 was Bond meets Rocky Horror. Whilst I’m highly entertained about a theme where equal opportunities rapist Frank ‘n’ Furter explains to misogynist Bond that you should treat women as well as you treat men, and Bond suggests to Frank that maybe you should ask permission first, I can’t help feeling that wasn’t quite the way the event was planned.

To check I wasn’t being hyper-sensitive I did ask a number of people what they thought. Liz Upton generously allowed me to quote her in full.

Liz Upton, Director of Communications, Raspberry Pi

James Bond – well, I SUPPOSE there’s the option of evening dresses for the ladies. That’s the very kindest spin I can put on it. Jesus, this industry sucks.

Last week we started a competition to win a Pi Zero. We’ve had a small number of entries, half from school age people eligible to win, the other half from entertained techies. We’ve also been using this as a job filter for some time so we have a rich depth of existing answers.

The competition is very simple, our web-page generates a mathematical sum for you to work out the answer to, and in order to succeed you have to send us the answer within one second. It’s an anti-turing test – a person can’t do it but a computer can. When you’ve succeeded we ask you to send us the code. This gives two important things, a code sample that a candidate wrote and an idea of how long it took them to work out they should automate it.

A text-book answer from an experienced techie is about 15-30 minutes and delivers a short piece of code that fetches the web-page, finds the sum with a regexp or similar, works out the answer with eval, creates the response and sends it back to us. However, people are much more creative than that.

One excellent answer was a single line of shell script, which did the whole thing in bash, but even more cleverly searched the process list for the command that had been typed in, added the escaping back in and then mailed itself to us – a one liner that did the puzzle, recreated its source code and emailed itself to us.

Another excellent answer was someone who guessed that our code had a 32 bit roll-over bug in, tried options until we generated an answer bigger than 2^32 and fixed the otherwise text-book code to implement the bug on our side.

The absolute worst answer we’ve ever seen was someone whose CV listed them as a professional programmer with five years experience. After two whole days of typing answers into the website they finally worked out that the problem had to be automated. After three days of development they wrote a vast piece of Java code that was able to download the page and find the problem but it was only able to work out the answer if there were only three numbers and they all had to be added together. Instead of improving the code for the general case they put it in a loop and repeatedly called the page until by sheer luck they got a page their code could answer. Creative genius but not in a good way.

On to the entrants

So this is a difficult challenge for school age children and teenagers. Most of the entries came from older children 16 and up, and it’s clear that it was difficult and they had to learn new things specifically to solve this. PHP and Python were the preferred languages – the most novice friendly of all the tools available. We were very torn as to who should win. After lots of deliberation our runner up is this php entry from Nils in Germany who was also the first to submit,

// That was fun. There should be more conetsts like this.
// Sorry for the incredibly hacked together code...
<?php

Things we particularly like are that all the comments and code and email are in English to make it easier for us, even though it’s the authors second language.

Our winner though goes to 13 year old Nick. From a pure technical standpoint his code isn’t as good as Nils’ entry above, but through the comments it tells the story of slowly working his way towards the solution and appropriately credits the help he received – both personal and online.

#Mythic Beasts - Win a Pi Zero
#Written by Nick Lockhart from Chepstow, Wales, aged 13 3/4
#with help from an old fossil (his dad)
#You will need LXML for Python and Requests

from lxml import html
import requests
debugmode = 1

#get the page and parse all

elements into a Python list.
#For this purpose we should only get one element.
page = requests.get(‘http://sphinx.mythic-beasts.com/cgi-bin/job.pl’)
tree = html.fromstring(page.content)
paragraphs = tree.xpath(‘//p/text()’)

#Split out the question.
#First take out everything after the sum (space included)
#And then remove everything before the sum (space again included.)
#And convert to a string. Oddly, after the second time, we have to
reference the second element as there is a blank string in question[0]
#Finally, evaluate it.

#There’s a hidden input labeled “id”, which seems to be randomly generated.
#This is probably to track who’s submitting.
#We will also need to extract this.
#I learnt this piece of magic with help from StackOverflow. Thanks,
Mathias Muller!

secretkey = tree.xpath(‘//input[@name=”id”]/@value’)[0]

#That’s all we need to POST. Let’s generate a payload, send it off and
extract the response.
#The server expects the answer to be a string, so we convert it to a string.

Of course the final comment to everyone who entered is if you ever need any kind of hosting, domain name or similar send us an email and include your entry number for a freebie / upgrade /discount. Secondly if you seek summer work or gap year employment, we’d invite you to get in touch and we guarantee that we’ll read your CV and take your application seriously.

If you’ve had a look at the Raspbian website today you’ll have noticed the big red !!!FAILOVER TEST!!! logo at the top right corner. That’s because today is officially unimportant for Raspberry Pi, whereas in three weeks time it will be officially very important. Historically Christmas day sees our highest traffic loads as people unwrap their new Raspberry Pis and try them out. The most critical things for us to worry about are some of the educational and getting started resources on the website, and Raspbian and the mirror director so people can download new packages for their existing Raspberry Pis.

The majority of the website has a relatively small amount of data, so pulling an image from backup and redeploying is a relatively quick operation. Raspbian however is a bit harder – it’s a big image with around 4TB of data.

So we picked today to schedule a failover of Raspbian from it’s normal dedicated server to a VM hosted in the Raspberry Pi cloud. This is aiming to check

Is the failover server up to date and does it work?

Is the failover setup fast enough to keep up with the traffic load?

Does every service successfully fail over?

So far we’ve had a very smooth operation, we’ve had to add a couple of missing packages that had been overlooked during setup and testing, but basically we did a DNS flip and the whole site moved over.

Thanks to a recent visit to Pi Towers, we’re in possession of a very difficult to get hold of Raspberry Pi Zero. Within Mythic Beasts we don’t have an immediate need for a Pi Zero, so we thought we’d give it away to someone more deserving. So here’s a competition.

This competition is open until 9th December at 17:00. In order to enter you must have been born on or after 1st September 1997. Send us a successful answer, and we’ll pick the one we like best and send the winner a Pi Zero.

People over the age of 18 will have to be satisfied merely with the respect of their peers and can go buy their own Pi Zero, for example from our customer Pi Supply.

Detailed Rules

SPONSOR

The Sponsor is Mythic Beasts Ltd, 103 Beche Road, Cambridge, CB5 8HX.

TERM

The Mythic Beasts Contest begins 2nd December 2015 at 17:00:00 UTC and ends 9 December 17:00:00 UTC. By submitting an Entry, each Entrant (or, where appropriate, the Entrant’s parent or legal guardian) agrees to the Official Rules presented here, and warrants that his or her Entry complies with all requirements set out in the Official Rules. This is a skill-based contest and chance plays no part in the determination of winners.

WHO MAY ENTER

The Contest is open only to individuals born on or after 1st September 1997. Employees of the Sponsor and their immediate family members (spouse, parent, child, sibling and their respective spouses, regardless of where they live) or persons living in the same households of such employees, whether or not related, are not eligible. CONTEST IS VOID WHERE PROHIBITED.

HOW TO ENTER

Visit http://sphinx.mythic-beasts.com/cgi-bin/job.pl and follow the instructions. When the challenge is complete submission details will be provided. You need an email address to receive a reply.

CONTEST PRIZES AND JUDGING

The prize is a Raspberry Pi Zero. This will be given to the best entry at the discretion of the judges.

The Sponsor reserves the right to take such steps as it deems necessary to verify the validity and originality of any Entry and/or Entrant (including an Entrant’s age, identity, address and authorship of the Entry), and to disqualify any Entrant who submits an Entry that is not in accordance with these Official Rules.

LICENCE

By entering the Contest, all Entrants grant an irrevocable, perpetual, royalty-free, worldwide non-exclusive licence to the Sponsor, to reproduce, distribute, and display their Entry.

LIMITATION OF LIABILITY

By entering this Contest, the Entrant (or, where appropriate, the Entrant’s parent or legal guardian) agrees to release, discharge, and hold harmless the Sponsor and its partners, affiliates, subsidiaries, advertising agencies, agents and their employees, officers, directors, and representatives from any claims, losses, and damages arising out of their participation in this Contest.

CONDITIONS

This Contest shall be subject to and governed by the laws of England and Wales.

If for any reason the Contest is not capable of running as planned for any cause beyond the control of Sponsor, Sponsor reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to cancel, terminate, or suspend the Contest. The Sponsor reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to amend the Official Rules at any time during the Contest.

A number of people noticed that Raspberry Pi had launched their $5 Pi Zero yesterday. We had advance warning that something was going to happen, even if we didn’t know exactly what. When the Pi2 launched we had some difficulties keeping up with comment posting and cache invalidation. We gave a very well received talk on the history and launch at the UK Network Operators Forum which you can see below.

Since then we’ve worked with Ben Nuttall to rebuild the entire hosting setup into an IPv6-only private cloud, hosted on one of our very large servers. This gives us :

Containment: One part of the site can’t significantly impact the performance of another.

Scalability: We can pull VMs into our public cloud and duplicate them if required.

Flexibility: We no longer have to have a single software stack that supports everything.

For the Pi 2 launch we sustained around 4500 simultaneous users before we really started struggling with comment posting and cache invalidation. So our new plan was to be able to manage over 5,000 simultaneous site users before we needed to start adding more VMs. This equates to around 1000 hits per second.

In order to do this, we need to make sure we can serve any of the 90% of the most common requests without touching the disks or the database; and without using more than 10ms of CPU time. We want to reserve all our capacity for pages that have to be dynamic – comment-posting and forums, for example – and make all the common content as cheap as possible.

So we deployed a custom script staticify. This automatically takes the most popular and important pages, renders them to static HTML and rewrites the webserver configuration to serve the static pages instead. It runs frequently so the cache is never more than 60 seconds old, making it appear dynamic. It also means that we serve a file from filesystem cache (RAM) instead of executing WordPress. During the day we improved and deployed this same code to the MagPi site including some horrid hackery to cache popular GET request combinations.

Found and hacked around the last non-cacheable item on the Magpi homepage, load now 6, was 130.

If you deployed the blog unoptimised to AWS and just had auto-magic scaling, we’d estimate the monthly bills to be many tens of thousands of dollars per month, money that instead can be spent on education. In addition you’d still need to make sure you can effortlessly scale to thousands of cores without a single bottleneck somewhere in the stack causing them all to lie idle. The original version of the site (with hopeless analytics plugin that processed the complete site logs on every request) would consume more computer power than has ever existed under the traffic mentioned above. At this scale optimisation is a necessity, and if you’re going to optimise, you might as well optimise well.

That said, we think some of our peers possibly overstated our importance in the big scheme of things,

On Monday, the Raspberry Pi 2 was announced, and The Register’s predictions of global geekgasm proved to be about right. Slashdot, BBC News, global trending on Twitter and many other sources covering the story resulted in quite a lot of traffic. We saw 11 million page requests from over 700,000 unique IP addresses in our logs from Monday, around 6x the normal traffic load.

The Raspberry Pi website is hosted on WordPress using the WP Super Cache plugin. This plugin generally works very well, resulting in the vast majority of page requests being served from a static file, rather than hitting PHP and MySQL. The second major part of the site is the forums and the different parts of the site have wildly differing typical performance characteristics. In addition to this, the site is fronted by four load balancers which supply most of the downloads directly and scrub some malicious requests. We can cope with roughly:

Cached WordPress

160 pages / second

Non cached WordPress

10 pages / second

Forum page

10 pages / second

Maintenance page

at least 10,000 pages / second

Back in 2012, during the original launch, we had a rather smaller server setup. That meant we simply just put a maintenance page up and directed everyone to buy a Pi direct from Farnell or RS, both of whom had some trouble coping with the demand. We also launched at 6am GMT so that most of our potential customers would still be in bed, spreading the initial surge over several hours.

This time, being a larger organisation with coordination across multiple news outlets and press conferences, the launch time was fixed for 9am on Feb 2nd 2015. Everything would happen then, apart from the odd journalist with premature timing problems – you know who you are.

Morning folks! As you may have gathered if you’ve been on Twitter this morning, we’ve just launched Raspberry Pi 2! http://t.co/L999uza8wu

Our initial plan was to leave the site up as normal, but set the maintenance page to be the launch announcement. That way if the launch overwhelmed things, everyone should see the announcement served direct from the load balancers and otherwise the site should function as normal. Plan B was to disable the forums, giving more resources to the main blog so people could comment there.

The Launch

It is a complete coincidence that our director Pete took off to go to this isolated beach in the tropics five minutes after the Raspberry Pi 2 launch.

At 9:00 the announcement went live. Within a few minutes traffic volumes on the site had increased by more than a factor of five and the forum users were starting to make comments and chatter to each other. The server load increased from its usual level of 2 to over 400 – we now had a massive queue of users waiting for page requests because all of the server CPU time was being taken generating those slow forum pages which starved the main blog of server time to deliver those fast cached pages. At this point our load balancers started to kick in and deliver the maintenance page to a large fraction of our site users – the fall back plan. This did annoy the forum and blog users who had posted comments and received the maintenance page back having just had their submission thrown away – sorry. During the day we did a little bit of tweaking to the server to improve throughput, removing the nf_conntrack in the firewall to free up CPU for page rendering, and changing the apache settings to queue earlier so people received either their request page or maintenance page more quickly.

We’ve temporarily disabled our forums to alleviate traffic to the main site. You can ask questions in the blog post comments! — Raspberry Pi (@Raspberry_Pi) February 2, 2015

Disabling the forums freed up lots of CPU time for the main page and gave us a mostly working site. Sometimes it’d deliver the maintenance page, but mostly people were receiving cached WordPress pages of the announcement and most of the comments were being accepted.

Super Cache not quite so super

Unfortunately, we were still seeing problems. The site would cope with the load happily for a good few minutes, and then suddenly have a load spike to the point where pages were not being generated fast enough. It appears that WP Super Cache wasn’t behaving exactly as intended.

When someone posts a comment, Super Cache invalidates its cache of the corresponding page, and starts to rebuild a new one, but providing you have this option ticked…

…(we did), the now out-of-date cached page should continue to be served until it is overwritten by the newer version.

After a while, we realised that the symptoms that we were seeing were entirely consistent with this not working correctly, and once you hit very high traffic levels this behaviour becomes critical. If cached versions are not served whilst the page is being rebuilt then subsequent requests will also trigger a rebuild and you spend more and more CPU time generating copies of the missing cached page which makes the rebuild take even longer so you have to build more copies each of which now takes even longer.

Now we can build a ludicrously overly simple model of this with a short bit of perl and draw a graph of how long it takes to rebuild the main page based on hit rate – and it looks like this.

This tells us that performance reasonably suddenly falls off a cliff at around 60-70 hits/second. At 12 hits/sec (typical usage) a rebuild of the page completes in considerably under a second, at 40 hits/sec (very busy) it’s about 4s, at 60 hits/sec it’s 30s, at 80hits/sec it’s well over five minutes. At that point the load balancers kick in and just display the maintenance page, and wait for the load to die down again before starting to serve traffic as normal again.

We still don’t know exactly what the cause of this was, so either it’s something else with exactly the same symptoms, or this setting wasn’t working or was interacting badly with another plugin, but as soon as we’d figured out the issue, we implemented the sensible workaround; we put a rewrite hack in to serve the front page and announcement page completely statically, then created the page afresh once every five minutes from cron, picking up all the newest comments. As if by magic the load returned to sensible levels, although there was now a small delay on new comments appearing.

Re-enabling the forums

With stable traffic levels, we turned the forums back on. And then immediately off again. They very quickly backed up the database server with connections, causing both the forums to cease working and the main website to run slowly. A little further investigation into the InnoDB parameters and we realised we had some contention on database locks, we reconfigured and this happened.

Our company pedant points out that actually only the database server process fell over, and it needed restarted not rebooting. Cunningly, we’d managed to find a set of improved settings for InnoDB that allowed us to see all the tables in the database but not read any data out of them. A tiny bit of fiddling later and everything was happy.

The bandwidth graphs

We end up with a traffic graph that looks like this.

On the launch day it’s a bit lumpy, this is because when we’re serving the maintenance page nobody can get to the downloads page. Downloads of operating system images and NOOBS dominates the traffic graphs normally. Over the next few days the HTML volume starts dropping and the number of system downloads for newly purchased Raspberry Pis starts increasing rapidly. At this point were reminded of the work we did last year to build a fast distributed downloads setup and were rather thankful because we’re considerably beyond the traffic levels you can sanely serve from a single host.

Could do a bit better

The launch of Raspberry Pi 2 was a closely guarded secret, and although we were told in advance, we didn’t have a lot of time to prepare for the increased traffic. There’s a few things we’d like to have improved and will be talking to with Raspberry Pi over the coming months. One is to upgrade the hardware adding some more cores and RAM to the setup. Whilst we’re doing this it would be sensible to look at splitting the parts of the site into different VMs so that the forums/database/Wordpress have some separation from each other and make it easier to scale things. It would have been really nice to have put our extremely secret test setup with HipHop Virtual Machine into production, but that’s not yet well enough tested for primetime although a seven-fold performance increase on page rendering certainly would be nice.

Schoolboy error

Talking with Ben Nuttall we realised that the stripped down minimal super fast maintenance page didn’t have analytics on it. So the difference between our stats of 11 million page requests and Ben’s of 1.5 million indicate how many people during the launch saw the static maintenance page rather than a WordPress generated page with comments. In hindsight putting analytics on the maintenance page would have been a really good idea. Not every http request which received the maintenance page was necessarily a request to see the launch, nor was each definitely a different visitor. Without detailed analytics that we don’t have, we can estimate the number of people who saw the announcement to be more than 1.5 million but less than 11 million.

Mythic Beasts has been supporting Raspberry Pi since we saw a small Atmel based prototype that Eben Upton was tremendously proud of and that we thought nobody would ever want. However, we’ve always been wary of betting against Eben and the fact we’re now providing enough bandwidth to download copies of N00BS considerably faster than we can make cups of coffee suggests that, much though it pains us to admit it, we might have been wrong and Eben might have been right.

On Saturday Pete went to join Raspberry Pi at their 3rd birthday party. It was a lot of fun. He drank beer brewed by a brewery controlled by Raspberry Pis, saw the magical RFID announcing machine declare Liz Upton ‘The Tyrannical Goddess of Time and Space’ which clearly had been set to maximum flattery mode. There was also a neat synthesiser with keyboards and a drum machine hooked up doing all the instrument synthesis on an original single core model B which resulted in this sort of Raspberry Jam:

ModMyPi also had a stock of quad core Pis meaning Pete was able to buy one in person for real money and skip the ordering delay on the ones he’s ordered online.

But mostly it was just great to see how far we’d come. At the original Raspberry Jam soon after launch in 2012 we met a lot of people who were exciting and fired-up with plans to do awesome things. Now lots and lots of awesome things have been done.

When @Raspberry_Pi started we wanted to inspire kids to do awesome things. Now they’ve done awesome things and inspired us. #PiParty

But I think it was Helen Lynn that summed it up best. She quietly said to me while surveying the amazing stuff in the room, ‘It really is loads better than when I was six’. Eben Uptons attempt to recreate the computers of his childhood in the 1980s has completely and utterly failed, it’s much cooler this time round.

After seven months and two weeks of uptime our Raspberry Pi mirror server fell over yesterday and required a power cycle to bring it back up. It lasted longer than it’s first USB hard disk which failed after about six months. Examining the logs suggests that the flash card is dying, yesterday it remounted read only and the network stack fell over. /var/log is on the external USB drive so we were able to see that the machine was alive, it could log ethernet connect/disconnect, it just couldn’t start the network back up.

During the time it was up it shipped about 1.5TB of downloads running an average of 3Mbps of traffic, quite regularly peaking at 10Mbps+.